File photo: A shopper rides the escalator past Nintendo advertisements at an electronics retail store in Tokyo January 20, 2014. Shares in Nintendo Co Ltd tumbled by nearly a fifth on Monday after it warned of a third straight year of operating losses, heaping pressure on the creator of "Super Mario" to abandon its policy of not licensing its software to rivals. (REUTERS/Yuya Shino)
People tend not to like change and gamers are no different it seems.
Nintendo fans around the world have reacted to the surprise news from the company that its iconic character Mario has quietly undergone a career change.
Mario is about as close to a mascot that Nintendo has, and for some reason the Japanese gaming giant felt compelled to update his CV.
Everyone knows Mario as a pipe-sliding plumber but he’s actually a jack of all trades.
“Mario was once a plumber … but that was a long time ago,” Nintendo says on its website.
Tech publication Kotaku noticed that the character’s profile on Nintendo’s official Japanese-language website states that Mario used to be a plumber.
Translated to English it reads: “All around sporty, whether it’s tennis or baseball, soccer or car racing, he does everything cool. As a matter of fact, he also seems to have worked as a plumber a long time ago.”
Despite the reminder of his many talents, it didn’t mention any new profession for the famous Italian character.
Nintendo fans are a bit miffed — and some are taking the news a little hard.
One social media user is blaming it on the millennials while another is comparing it to the shock of the Brexit referendum result.
Tongue-in-cheek tweets aside, the character has always been somewhat of a chameleon.
When Mario was introduced in the 1981 Donkey Kong arcade game, he was known only as Jumpman.
In a 2011 interview Nintendo game designer and producer Shigeru Miyamoto said he was then reimagined as a carpenter.
“The game’s stage was a construction site, so we made him into basically a carpenter,” he said. “We brought in Luigi (in Super Mario Bros) and a lot of the game was played underground so we made him to fit that setting and, we decided he could be a plumber.
“The scenario dictates his role.”
This story originally appeared in news.com.au
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